


melt your headaches, call it home

by roisale



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Multi, mentions of yachi/misaki/tsuchiyu/background kagehinas and kurodai RIP, pacrim au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 07:43:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2183550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roisale/pseuds/roisale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A lot of people end up hating each other after their first Drift,” Nishinoya says, helmet tucked in the crook of his elbow. "But you know," he adds, looking up at Ennoshita with a cheeky sort of grin, "I don't think I could ever hate you."</p><p>"That's," Ennoshita stumbles, feeling his face freeze somewhere between confusion and embarrassment, "That's nice of you, I think."</p>
            </blockquote>





	melt your headaches, call it home

**Author's Note:**

> i know the world's a broken bone / but melt your headaches, call it home / hey moon, please forget to fall down / hey moon, don't you go down

 

 

i.

 

“Drift Compatibility is a funny thing,” Suga tells him one day during their lunch break. 

Ennoshita hands him a cup of coffee and sits down at the table with his own mug cradled between his fingers. “Funny?” 

“Sometimes it’s obvious, you know, you look at a crew and you think, well, of course they’re Drift Compatible. What else could they be?” Suga takes a sip and winces at the bitterness. Ennoshita nudges some creamer towards him without a word.

“But other times, it’s like,” Suga pauses, trying to get the right words out, “it’s like you’d never have expected it, but it makes sense, it works, you know,  _they_  work.”

Ennoshita nods. He’s seen it happen, seen the most mismatched of co-pilots fight like they’d been born to sync, then and there, in the Conn-Pod of a Jaeger. And he knows why Suga’s bringing it up now - news and gossip travel fast in the Shatterdome. They’d found pilots for the new Mark-4 Jaeger, Firefly Bruiser, but it'd been more of a surprise discovery than anything else.

“Tanaka and Tsukishima Kei, you mean?” Ennoshita asks, mulling it over.

“Yeah, I mean, who’d’ve thought, right?” Suga laughs and rubs the weary out of his eyes. “But you know, their siblings both operated that one Jaeger a few years back, the one called - "

“Small Giant,” Ennoshita supplies, and Suga swallows down more coffee.

“Unexpected,” Suga says, like a repetition. “But they’re brilliant in battle, and that’s all anyone’s looking for.”

Ennoshita looks down, the overhead lights a bright spot reflected in his cup. He knows Tanaka. They’d trained together back when he, Kinoshita, and Narita were still enrolled in the Jaeger Program. Tanaka is unyielding strength under pressure, the kind of man Ennoshita would trust with his life.

He wonders, for a moment, if Tsukishima does, too; but he remembers - Tsukishima and Tanaka are Jaeger pilots. This is the  _one_  overarching requirement, when you're fighting in a Jaeger - trust your co-pilot more than you trust yourself.

 

Tanaka and Nishinoya always join Kinoshita, Narita, and Ennoshita at the same table for lunch, the one tucked in the corner of the cafeteria. Suga's there today, too, Ennoshita notices, when he turns away from the lunch line and heads towards the back.

"Administration says they'll try here before they ask the other Shatterdomes for help," Nishinoya's saying when Ennoshita draws close and Suga moves aside, clearing an empty space for him to sit. "D'you think it might just be because the Marshal doesn't want to deal with - what's his name, that one  _really_  good Jaeger pilot - Ushijima?"

Ennoshita’s learned to trace the flow of conversation by now and he settles back serious, nodding to Suga when he sits down at the table with his tray of food. "What's going on?"

“Oh, Noya still doesn't have a co-pilot,” Tanaka says, munching on a sandwich. He swallows. “I'd fill in, but our sync rates weren’t ever above 50%, and I’m piloting with Tsukishima now, anyway.”

“It wouldn’t have been a problem before,” Suga says, his voice light. He’s facing Tanaka, but there’s something in his tone that catches on the edges of Ennoshita's attention, makes him sit up straight and listen close. “It's just, they finished building another Jaeger, the last of the Mark-4s, and Nishinoya’s the only one available to pilot it.” Nishinoya nods, humming affirmation and poking the straw through his juice box.

“Everyone else is Drift Incompatible, you know?” Tanaka says, and he doesn’t have to add ‘or dead’ to the end of his sentence. “There’s no point in having an empty Jaeger and one pilot, so the higher-ups are trying to find someone who can co-pilot with him.”

“If all the other Rangers are incompatible or paired up, then where're they going to find another pilot?” Kinoshita asks, tapping his fingers on the table. Double, triple, half time; after a while, Ennoshita gives up trying to assign Kinoshita a tempo.

“They’re going through the PPDC officers now,” Nishinoya says. He scrunches up his nose, yanks the straw and carton out of his mouth with a huff. “Jeez, that’s sour.”

Narita blinks, once, twice. “But the officers aren’t trained for it, that’d be like sending them to - ”

“Most PPDC officers have passed the first cut of the Jaeger Program,” Suga reminds him. “They’re not complete novices, and they’d go through through a few weeks of a pretty intensive crash course before piloting a Jaeger.”

Suga keeps staring at Ennoshita with a contemplative kind of look on his face, his fingers curled loose around the cup in front of him, and Ennoshita feels the discomfort in his chest like a clock that’s a half-second slow. He stands up, the backs of his knees hitting the bench. “Sorry, I have to get back and check on the transmitter, it’s been a bit buggy on test runs lately,” he says, excusing himself, because Ennoshita knows what Suga’s trying to get at. Suga is subtle, and a lot craftier than anyone gives him credit for, but Ennoshita’s neither oblivious nor easy to fool.

 

(Suga doesn't bring it up again for a while, keeps quiet even during the checkups and testing, one week later. When Ennoshita leaves the med bay, rolling his sleeves down after a blood test, he looks back once and finds Suga talking with the doctor he'd just left, sees them exchanging charts and data.)

("It's just another test," Suga says, sitting him down in his office; "I'm a Psych Analyst, after all.")

(In the end, it is not a surprise when the Marshal calls him up to attention, one week later.)

 

Suga’s standing in the shadows, his hands folded neat and clean in front of him. The smile on his face is almost a little sad.

“Report to the Kwoon in two hours, Ennoshita,” Oikawa says, voice airy and light; Ennoshita thinks, the look in his eyes is anything but. 

Ennoshita inclines his head, raises his hand in a salute, says it flat: "Yes, sir."

  

Nishinoya drops his staff on the floor when Ennoshita shows up with a knock on the door frame and a perfunctory hello. Nishinoya is  _surprised_.

“Chikara?” Nishinoya asks, bending to pick it up, spinning it deft in his hands. “So, wait, that means you - ”

Ennoshita slips his shoes off and steps on the mat, hands firm on his own staff, gripping it like the tail end of an errant thought. He’d never been stellar at martial arts, but he’d practiced to the point where it feels like muscle memory now, the way he settles into an open stance, knees bent easy and keeping balance like time.

He thinks back to something Suga had said, once, ages ago, it feels like: “Sparring is a conversation, so it’s best to pay attention.”

And he does.

This is what he notices: Nishinoya moves with a kind of feline elegance; silent and not-quite-deadly. It's the kind of presence you feel on the back of your neck but can’t ever avoid, and every time Ennoshita steps in, Nishinoya’s there to block him. Perfect counterforce, just enough to stop him in his tracks, never enough to knock either of them off balance, and Ennoshita notes: Nishinoya does not ever attack. 

(He's not sure whether it's important or not, but Nishinoya fights with the most graceful hands he's ever seen.)

Nishinoya wins the fight, in the end, even without aggression.  _Figures_ , Ennoshita thinks, admiring just how  _good_  Nishinoya is. He winces at the cold burn in his lungs, his breaths scraping up and past his throat like wet sand. He's been working mission control for two years; he's nowhere near as fit as a Jaeger pilot ought to be.  _I should probably fix that_ , he says to himself, struggling to catch his breath.

Nishinoya looks over at him and a grin spreads on his face, slow to start, at first; and then it's wide, too wide, and it feels like it'll never stop, like he was made to smile and that's just what he's going to  _do._  Like if someone bought ten hundred fireworks and set them all off one after the other, Ennoshita thinks; that's what Nishinoya's smile feels like right now. “Wow,” Nishinoya says, sprawling forward and propping himself up on his elbows, “so it was you!”

( _It was you all along and I never knew, how about that?_ )

(“So it was you,” Nishinoya says, and Ennoshita wants to laugh, wants to tell Suga that he’d been right about it all, had always been right.)

Because - it's a laughable situation; him, of all people, a Jaeger Academy dropout and the shadow man behind mission control - him, Drift Compatible with Nishinoya Yuu, the Jaeger Program’s guardian deity of sorts, the Shatterdome’s best defensive pilot. So it’s funny, but in the worst kind of way.

“Yeah,” he says, rolling over and letting his head fall to the side. He gives Nishinoya a tired smile. “Yeah, it was me.”

He doesn’t know Nishinoya the way you’d know your best friend or your lover. He doesn’t know Nishinoya the way co pilots do, not yet; the ones that fight, the ones that win? They're the ones that  _fit_ , take up the empty spaces in each other until they stop being two people, until everyone and their Jaeger acknowledges them as  _one_. They're competent, they're tough, they've been through hell and back together. 

He knows Nishinoya from two years in Jaeger Academy, from eating lunch together on their breaks and passerby hello's in the hallway and a few distant years of being boys, and it shouldn't be enough to Drift;  _he_  shouldn't be enough for Nishinoya or the Jaeger program. 

(But he’s picked up too much about him along the way. He’s seen him in action, he's catalogued his moves and constructed counterattacks like set pieces on a stage of salt water and empty shores and burning cities and maybe - maybe that's all he needs to fight.)

When he steps out of the sparring room, his legs feel a lot like jelly, but he keeps himself upright anyway. Suga’s standing just outside the door with a bottle of water in his hands, tapping it against Ennoshita's arm. “Thought you might need some water,” Suga says. “What did you think?”

Ennoshita doesn't answer at first; he exhales slow, falls into step with Suga as they start walking down the hall. He opens his mouth when they round the corner. “So,” he says after a few steps past a few Shatterdome technicians, “am I going to survive the Jaeger pilot crash course?”

And Suga smiles. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I have faith in you! See you in the simulator room at 6 tomorrow.”

 

He opens the door to his room, notes Kinoshita and Narita's empty bunks; he stands, for a moment, facing the wall.

 _I should shower_ , he thinks, grabbing a towel and turning back towards the door. But Kinoshita and Narita burst in a second later, the door clanging against the wall. They stop, stare at him for a good few moments, eyes wide and panic, panic,  _panic_  written in the tempo of their breaths.

“You-” Narita begins, frantic, hand tightening on the doorknob.

Kinoshita swallows. “You’re going to pilot a Jaeger?” His voice blurs towards a whisper, hush-small, and Ennoshita nods.

The problems with piloting a Jaeger, Ennoshita thinks, are these: they're not boys anymore, and glory dreams fade fast when heroes die human. They’re not the same as they were when they’d entered Jaeger Academy. By now, they've learned, from experience - there's nothing worse in a war economy than the price of naïveté.

But for the most part, they recognize that over the years, piloting a Jaeger had become someone else's duty, someone else's suicide mission.

“Yeah, I am,” Ennoshita says, muffling himself in the towel. He knows they can hear him through it, but he lets himself hide for just a little longer. "Training starts tomorrow. I guess they’re going to have someone else cover for me at mission control.”

Kinoshita and Narita exchange looks. Kinoshita’s hands are shaking, the way they do when he’s anxious, and Ennoshita - he hasn’t seen that in a long while. He gets up and presses his own hands to Kinoshita’s until the tremors die down.

“It’ll be fine,” Ennoshita says, hoping that maybe if he says the words out loud, he'll be able to make them come true. “It’s okay.”

“No,” Kinoshita says in a small voice, like the boy he used to be, “it’s not.”

And they are quiet that night.

 

Ennoshita stares at the ceiling and blinks, like maybe it'll speed up the seven minutes it usually takes for him to fall back blank. But the view doesn't change even if he closes his eyes, and sleep's never been kind to the fearful, anyway.

He knows, it's nothing new, it's nothing he hadn't expected, it's nothing but this, just this: he doesn't have any delusions of grandeur; never has, never will. The minutes stretch thin and he starts wondering - if he became a stranger child, found a new fear of the dark, would the night eat his monsters for him?

(or would it tell him what he already knows: that it never gets easier, trying to be brave?) 

 

“You look tired,” Nishinoya says when he skips in despite the drive suit's weight, tugging at his gloves. Ennoshita lifts his shoulders up in a shrug, lets them fall slouched.  

“I didn’t sleep very well,” Ennoshita says. And it's true, he didn't.

Kinoshita and Narita stare at displays and run start-ups and prep - they are afraid, but not for what might happen today. Today is just a test-run, the next few weeks are just training; Ennoshita isn’t in danger, not yet.

(It’s the ‘yet’ that scares them.) 

 

ii.

 

“A lot of people end up hating each other after their first Drift,” Nishinoya says, helmet tucked in the crook of his elbow. "But you know," he adds, looking up at Ennoshita with a cheeky sort of grin, "I don't think I could ever hate you."

"That's," Ennoshita stumbles, feeling his face freeze somewhere between confusion and embarrassment, "That's nice of you, I think."

Nishinoya beams, like he hadn't said anything particularly out of the ordinary. "Everything'll be okay. Trust me!" He holds out his pinky. “Here, pinky promise!”

Ennoshita stares at it for a few seconds before raising his right hand to Nishinoya’s left. He hooks their pinky fingers together; he thinks it might be a question, he knows it's an offering.

(“Be careful during your first Drift,” Suga had said a few days ago, handing him his reassignment papers.)

("Careful," Ennoshita had repeated, knowing Suga meant something more than just common sense.)

(Suga had given him a hapless sort of shrug, then. "You - you'll be giving up a lot in the Drift, and some of it you won't ever get back. But you can't do much about that. Just - don’t chase the R.A.B.I.T., don’t focus on any one memory in particular, and don’t fight the Drift.")

"Don't try to keep secrets," Kiyoko reminds him now.

"Not a problem," Ennoshita says, setting the helmet edges around his neck. He pulls up a few last scraps of calm for her, gives it like gratitude. "What's left to keep?"

"You'd be surprised," Kiyoko says, the line of her lips bent melancholic. It's another sad smile, and that's just the thing, isn't it? Lately, everybody's been giving him sad smiles, it seems. "But you know," she reaches out and adjusts the fit of his helmet for him, "I think you'll be okay, in the end."

She steps away, closes the hatch behind her, and then they are alone, save for the quiet humming of the simulator machine.

A mechanical countdown (ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one), and a flash of white  _blue -_

 

(They drop out of Jaeger Academy because it’s so - goddamn -  _intensive_  and everyone knows only a tiny fraction of the applicants were ever going to pilot Jaegers, anyway. Thing is, they’d made it past the first cut and they’d been qualified to take up positions as officers in the Shatterdome so that’s what they did; they came back, but they never forgot that they'd left.)

( _Reasonable_ , everyone had said -  _so what if you just weren't cut out for it, that's okay, Jaeger pilots are a special kind of crazy, anyway -_  )

( _Crazy,_  Ennoshita had thought when Daichi had come by his room, handed him a file folder and said,  _they assigned you to LOCCENT mission control, you'll supervise our Jaeger with Suga -_  and then he'd just patted him on the back and  _left_ , like he trusted Ennoshita, like he didn't see an issue with leaving a part of his life in Ennoshita's hands _._  And Ennoshita had watched his back as he left and thought: how  _heavy._ )

(Later, Narita had held up his papers and Kinoshita had nodded, said: "J-tech, they put us in J-tech - ")

(But Kinoshita and Narita do well in J-tech. Kinoshita’s all speedy efficiency and nimble fingers and Narita’s got this near-instinctive sense for the way things  _click._  Ennoshita can tell when they fall into rhythm, when their jobs stop being jobs and start being: another part of life, it feels like, finding new ways to bring down monsters. These are the things Ennoshita remembers: Kinoshita, edging through the door to their room with bits and pieces of work in his hands; abandoned prototypes, old circuitry, silicone chips. Narita's eyes lit up bright, and they'd spend the next few hours putting scraps together at the table by the back wall. By the end of the week, they'd have finished -  _something_ , something cheerful, something innocent - something harmless, built from the same metal forged to defend and destroy and kill.  _Something_  meant a little automaton bird, one day - made of gears and old watch parts - it couldn't ever fly, but it moved with clinks and whirrs and let out measured ticks when it tried to sing. And Narita gave it away, two months after he'd made it - two months after he'd made it, that was - )

"Ennoshita, you're falling out of alignment," Kiyoko says, her voice a vein of marble a million miles away, distant -

( - when Kiyoko saved a girl named Yachi from the wreckage of a city they had both called home, once; when Kiyoko came back only to retire as a pilot, to leave her Jaeger behind, when Yachi stepped forward with her small fists clenched too tight to tremble and said:  _I'll do my best, I'll fight, too -_  )

( - and after that, they folded her hands around a clockwork bird, told her:  _she's only two months old, take good care of her, welcome to the Shatterdome -_  ) 

"Sorry," Ennoshita says, focusing on the displays in front of him, "I'm okay now, don't worry."

(The Shatterdome.)

( _Their_  Shatterdome - Nishinoya and Tanaka end up in the same one after they graduate from the Jaeger Academy. It is brisk and military and austere, at first, but - after Nishinoya's first kill, he finds himself saying to his co-pilot:  _come on, let's go home._ )

( _Let's go home, let's go back -_  he means it, he does. When he's in a Jaeger, though, there's something about the open sky and sea that makes him - curious, that's all, after months spent under a metal ceiling. The horizon looks a lot like freedom, looks like he could keep reaching out and never find the end, but - the sky is the wrong place to be when everything comes from  _below._  And he thinks: on the ground, he can fight, he can keep people safe; he can do a lot on the ground.) 

(So he doesn't want the sky.)

(He wants - )

"Nishinoya," Kiyoko warns, "Ease up."

The Drift is a mess of mental static for a while, flashes of life on mute.

(Their first month at the Shatterdome is slow and fast all at once, but it stops being anything but  _there_  after awhile. One month turns into two and two months go by five more times until they're hit the year-mark and that year turns into another and the only breaks in the flow come from kaiju attacks, like they're reminding them: they are an  _enemy._  The world will keep being a battlefield until one of them wins, and - )

( - the thing is, none of them know when the Shatterdome stops being a war camp, but what they do is this: they memorize the floor plans and turn wartime sparsity into efficiency, live life by clocks and countdowns and count-ups and never let themselves fall into complacency. But sometimes they'll reach out to the lonely and the alone and say:  _we're family now_ , for the ones who have nothing left but shared names on a memorial.)

(And that's how they do it; they gather up the scraps, put the pieces together; they get  _used_  to it. It never gets easier, but they get used to it.)

(They’ve watched pilots die, they’ve thrown flowers in graves and set wreaths on memorials for when they can't recover the bodies. They’ve watched Jaegers sit and rust in Oblivion Bay, the graveyard for dead giants that weren’t alive in the first place. It could’ve been them. But it’s not, and sometimes, they feel relieved.)

(It’s funny.)

(It’s funny, and it’s almost relaxing.) 

"You're fine, you're both in alignment," Kiyoko says, sliding a finger across the display. "How are you feeling?"

Ennoshita blinks, trying to come up with an answer. "Good," he thinks he says. He's not sure. His mouth is moving, so it's - probably him  - 

"Great!" Nishinoya says, and Ennoshita shrugs, tells Kiyoko,  _more or less._

"Okay," Kiyoko says over the comm. "We're going to run through some basic drills now…"

  

(He doesn't know how long they spend in the simulator, how long they spend in the Drift - he can hear Kiyoko saying, _that's good, we're done for today -_ )

 The Drift cuts off.

 

It's - odd, no, that's not good enough, not accurate enough to describe the  _disconnect_  - he stumbles, looks to his right, meets Nishinoya's eyes, and there's the strangest -  kind - of -  _pull_  - 

"..me. Can you hear me?" Kiyoko repeats herself a few more times before Ennoshita can focus enough to respond; he blinks, tries to answer.

 _"_ Yeah, we hear you!" Nishinoya says, tugging his helmet off (and Ennoshita reaches up to his own without realizing), "I'll get Ennoshita back to his room to rest, since it's his first Drift and all."

 _We_ , Ennoshita thinks, trying to figure out why it feels right and wrong all at once; right, because it's supposed to be, they're Jaeger co-pilots, the two of them. So it should be right but it's wrong, because, because - 

"Hey, Chikara," Nishinoya's saying, and his hands clap firm on the sides of Ennoshita's face, drawing him down. Ennoshita finds himself leaning in, doesn't feel like stopping him when Nishinoya touches their foreheads together and -  _oh._

It's the contact - skin against skin, a reassurance, one last scrap of connection:  _you can trust me, trust me, trust me -_  they stand there for a while, seconds ticking into minutes, marked slow by the way their breaths fall into step with each other. And it doesn't feel like time, doesn't feel anything but  _right._

  

The next day, Ennoshita moves through the line on autopilot, scooping up spaghetti on his plate and reaching into the refrigerated units, feeling an inexplicable craving for something cold. Kuroo and Daichi talk in low voices a few feet away, Kuroo leaning down so their faces are almost close enough to touch. Ennoshita smiles at the way Daichi reaches up and pushes his hand through Kuroo's hair, scolding,  _I keep telling you to get a haircut, it's getting in your eyes and that's a safety hazard, you know?_ Kuroo shrugs and gives Daichi a lazy smile, drawls,  _well, I can still see you, so I'll take my chances -_ Daichi sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose, but he tangles the fingers of his free hand between Kuroo's anyway, and the look on his face softens into something a little like fondness. 

He's always  _noticed_  the small things Jaeger co-pilots do, the way they're all brushing shoulders and bumping elbows and the backs of their hands knocking against each other when they walk. He's never paid much attention to it until now, though. His tray of food sits untouched; his focus is elsewhere, on the other pilot pairs in the cafeteria. Ennoshita studies them almost absent-mindedly, eyes skipping from crew to crew. Misaki Hana, one of Breaker Polaris's original pilots, and her new partner - Tsuchiyu, that's his name - they keep each other close, never more than an arm's distance away. Misaki holds her hand out to Tsuchiyu, and he takes it, trails behind her with their fingers linked loose together. It is a delicate kind of contact, Ennoshita thinks, watching them slip between people, but only in the same way spider silk looks fragile until touched. They leave, side-stepping Hinata and Kageyama on the way out.

Kageyama walks in first, hands shoved in his pockets; Hinata bounces up from behind, tugs at Kageyama's sleeve with his head cocked to the side like a question. "Kageyama," Hinata says, "don't look so pissy all the time, you'll scare the cooks," and then he ducks, right before Kageyama makes to smack him. Ennoshita smiles into his hand. They've each got this odd sort of - orbit when it comes to the other, he wants to say. He remembers when Kageyama had first come to their Shatterdome, remembers the way he cut a lonely path through the halls, remembers the way he'd never look back. That was then. Now, it seems as if Hinata's always - there, just  _there,_ by his side or behind him, always right where Kageyama can see him. Now, when Kageyama turns around, it's because Hinata's grabbing at his shirt or patting him on the back, like he's telling him:  _hey, I'm here, I'm here, I'm right here._ They're good for each other, Ennoshita thinks, letting his line of vision fall to the spaghetti under his fork.

"Chikara!" 

Nishinoya's voice cuts through the background noise and Ennoshita moves over on instinct, feels Nishinoya drop into the seat next to him with a neat thump. "Hey," Ennoshita says, lifting his elbow so Nishinoya can slide his tray on the table.

"Hi!" Nishinoya beams at him, and then he jumps full-throttle into conversation. "Okay, so they're all out of popsicles because somebody took the last one and - " his eyes widen at Ennoshita's food tray, "wait, it was  _you_ , you took the last popsicle - "

"I did?" Ennoshita looks down. The popsicle lies on his tray, innocent, an inadvertent prisoner of war. It's still wrapped and frozen solid - Ennoshita frowns, picks it up and holds it out to Nishinoya. "Sorry, I didn't realize - I don't even like these, I don't know why - ?"

Nishinoya takes it. "Thanks! You know," he adds, tearing the wrapper off, "It's probably because they're my favorite. Nice of you to get it before someone else did, though." Ennoshita watches him bite the top off of his ice cream in mixed horror and bemusement.

 _It's probably because they're my favorite_ , Nishinoya had said, and that makes - sense, Ennoshita thinks; he doesn't know why, but it does. A lot of things make sense now, it feels like. And then Nishinoya's teeth meet soft wood instead of sugary ice and Ennoshita winces ( _two bites, that was only two bites -_ ), turns back to his own food, and starts eating.

"You two look cozy," Tanaka says a few minutes later, sitting down across from them, and Ennoshita looks up from his spaghetti, opening his mouth to say something. He realizes that, yes, he and Nishinoya are pretty damn cozy; they're sitting closer than they need to, pressed up like they're saving space, even though there's plenty of room on the bench. Ennoshita makes a  _what-can-you-do_ sort of face and rolls up more spaghetti on his fork. He's not a touchy person; never has been, never thought he'd be one at any point in his future, but here they are, the two of them: there's not more than an inch of distance between them at any given time, and it is a certifiable miracle that they're managing to eat without getting in each other's way.  

"Maybe it's a pilot thing," Ennoshita ventures after four more forkfuls of pasta, wondering if it is, actually, a pilot thing. Tanaka nods, says,  _yeah, that explains it_ , and then he takes a massive chomp out of his bagel. So it's a pilot thing now, Ennoshita thinks, reaching out to move Nishinoya's juice box half a moment before Nishinoya's arm passes through the then-occupied space. It takes him a little while to remind himself: he is a Jaeger pilot. And that's okay, he can deal with that - 

"Oh, Takeda told me to tell you," Nishinoya says, having discarded the popsicle stick, "We get to see our Jaeger today!"

He's... not sure he can deal with that. 

 

Takeda leads them past the control center and over to a viewing platform, says, "Here she is, the last of the Mark-4s! How does she look?" 

Their Jaeger is smaller than most; it sits unassuming in a cathedral of giants. But it's still skyscraper-tall, still sixteen hundred tons of steel and hope, still made to fight like a hurricane, still a  _Jaeger_. It's a sleek behemoth made of laser-cut edges and sharp lines that taper down and say: it was meant to fly, it was meant to beat down gods and leave nothing but the silence of victory behind.

Ennoshita forgets to breathe, doesn't answer for a good few seconds. The words catch in his throat, fix him to the spot - he's not - sure how he feels, not yet - standing before their Jaeger, he's humbled, he's insignificant, he's in  _awe_. "Beautiful," he says, when he remembers what language is for, and then he amends, "Dangerous." 

"She looks  _incredible_ ," Nishinoya says, face glowing and eyes bright. He turns to Takeda, asks, "What's her name?"

"Volta Bravo," Takeda says with a sheepish smile, holding his clipboard to his chest. "Kiyoko nicknamed it Volta, said it'd get confusing if we called you Bravo instead." 

“ _Volta_   _Bravo_ ,” Nishinoya repeats, near-reverent, still staring at their Jaeger. "That’s so  _cool_!”

“It does sound pretty badass, yeah,” Ennoshita admits. “Kind of flashy, though.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Nishinoya says, shooting him a wink and a grin. He hops down from the viewing platform and bounces towards the exit, turning just before the exit, waiting. Ennoshita sighs.

"Thank you," he says to Takeda, and then he takes the stairs (there are only three steps), because they exist to be used and that's what he's going to  _do_. One last glance at their Jaeger before he goes, though - Volta Bravo _._  Ennoshita says the name to himself as he walks by his old station at LOCCENT. It's a good name for a good Jaeger. He's just not sure he deserves to pilot it. 

"Chikara," Nishinoya's calling, already six steps ahead, "Hurry up!"

"Coming," Ennoshita says.

 

iii.

 

Ennoshita's glad curfew isn't as much of a  _thing,_ especially when Kaiju attacks don't differentiate between day and night. But Kinoshita and Narita start staying up late to wait for him, and he wants to say,  _don't do that for me, don't -_

(He tries not to think about Kinoshita and Narita waiting for him to come back safe after a drop, tries not to think about what their room would look like with two bunks instead of three. Would they even take his bunk out? Or would they just find someone else to fill up the empty bed he'd left?) 

He's too-aware of the fact that he's just not as  _good_  as the other pilots are, and he knows there's not much he can do about that besides practice and work harder and get  _better_  in the short time he's got.

"Take it easy," Suga says the second time he catches Ennoshita in the Kwoon after hours, pushing a cup of tea in his hands, "It's okay to take breaks, you know."

(But idleness is anxiety and spare time is doubt and he ends up spending his time training, training, training until it hurts. He’s making up for lost time, or something like that: he still can’t help feeling inadequate and pathetic for running away from Ranger training, years ago.)

So things don't get easier, he's finding - sometimes, they get worse.

 

"Chikara," Nishinoya says, three weeks after their first Drift, "Follow me - " 

"Wait, I've got - " 

"Nope!" Nishinoya spins back and rocks on his heels. "I got you out of training for today because - don't give me that look - you've been really tired lately. You're working  _way_  too hard."

"But - " 

"I know," Nishinoya says, and that's that. It is hard to fight the truth, so Ennoshita doesn't try. He knows how he looks, face pale and the skin under his eyes smudged sleepless; his body feels like it's made of stone but he can't bring himself to agree, somehow. Maybe he'll never stop being hard on himself for - a lot of things, really, like not being good enough or as at least, as good as he should be, or not working hard enough or - 

"Come on," Nishinoya says, taking him by the hand ("Yeesh, your hands are cold. Did you take an ice bath or something?"). He leads Ennoshita through hallways and up stairs and around corners Ennoshita's not sure he's seen in months until he stops in a lonely part of the Shatterdome nobody uses, hides them both in an empty room and says, "You're going to sleep, right now!"

Ennoshita doesn't argue, not at this point. Nishinoya flops on the floor and pats the spot next to him with an expectant look, rewards Ennoshita with a nod of satisfaction when he gives in and sits down against the wall. Ennoshita closes his eyes, and the dull ache behind them fades little by little until he doesn't feel anything but warm.

 

"I spent a really long time hoping you'd come back, you know," Nishinoya says one day, sliding his fingers between Ennoshita's. It's not a perfect fit, but Nishinoya leaves them there anyway, like a jigsaw puzzle he'd spent forever trying to finish. "'Cause you were there, and then you weren't, and things didn't feel right 'til you were there again." He means it, Ennoshita can tell. Nishinoya has always meant the things he says, has always meant  _well_. 

"Sorry," Ennoshita says, and Nishinoya gives him a look, his mouth half-pursed. Nishinoya thinks he needs to stop apologizing. Ennoshita thinks that's easier said than done.

 

They're kept off active duty for awhile; Nishinoya spends his free time helping Ennoshita out with his training, to speed up the process.

"No, you gotta do  _this_ ," Nishinoya says, twisting his body under Ennoshita's arm, "Like - " a series of unintelligible sounds, "And  _bam_ ," Nishinoya flips Ennoshita on his back, "That's how!"

It's odd, that Ennoshita knows exactly what Nishinoya means by now; not that he's learned to decipher the sound effects Nishinoya makes, it's more like - he  _understands_. 

He gets back up. Two seconds of pause pass before he settles low and ducks under the swing of Nishinoya's staff, whips around to grab hold of his elbow, yanks him  _down_  and Nishinoya tumbles to the mat with a surprised  _oof_. Ennoshita half expects him to land on his feet.

"So like this," Ennoshita says, leaning over him after a few seconds to see why he hadn't gotten up. 

Nishinoya's flat on his back, staring breathless up at Ennoshita with huge eyes before he breaks into a wide grin. "Yeah," Nishinoya says, and then he loops his arms around Ennoshita's neck, brings their foreheads together in a display of affection that's almost - intimate, the way Nishinoya never is, "Like that."

It's the farthest thing from comfortable, but they stay on the floor for a while longer, until Ennoshita remembers that they're in the middle of training. "Come on," he says, trying to get to his feet, "We have work to do."

"Yeah," Nishinoya says, letting him. "But you know, you're getting pretty good at this!"

 

"Hey, what did you want to be, you know, before the Kaiju attacked?" 

Ennoshita keeps his eyes closed, feels Nishinoya's voice humming low against his stomach. "I don't really know," he says after a few seconds, trying to remember when  _battles_ and  _war_  were another world away, when they weren't his problems. "I liked movies. I think I wanted to go to film school, be a director, maybe."

Nishinoya sits up a little, still sprawled in Ennoshita's lap, and Ennoshita opens his eyes on reflex to find Nishinoya splaying small hands on his chest, for no good reason at all, probably. "I don't know what I wanted to be, either," Nishinoya says, leaning in with a bright smile. "But okay, hey, you know I'd go see  _all_  your movies if you made them - "

"Don't you only watch action flicks?" Ennoshita asks. He thinks about lunch breaks with Tanaka and Nishinoya and Kinoshita and Narita, thinks about that one conversation about explosions and dynamite and the definition of  _winning_. 

"Shh," Nishinoya shushes him, bumping their noses together, and Ennoshita doesn't protest, sits quiet and lets him do the whole nose-nuzzling thing because it actually feels kind of nice. Nishinoya grins, and he stretches up a few inches to rest his chin on Ennoshita's shoulder. "Okay, look, you're different, because I know you'd do a good job! I'd watch any movie if you made it, because it'd be fucking  _great_ , and then I'd get to be like, 'Hey, I know the director, he's really cute - '" Ennoshita scoffs, and Nishinoya nudges his cheek against Ennoshita's neck, "And he likes weird food but that's okay because he's smart and nice to hug! So it doesn't even matter that he likes  _vinegared sea pineapples - "_

"You're getting off-topic," Ennoshita reminds him, and then: "What is your  _problem_  with vinegared sea pineapples? I like them." 

"And I like you," Nishinoya says, as if it's relevant to the subject matter. His words are a light buzz into Ennoshita's skin. "But you're  _way_  better than sea pineapples, because they're gross and you're not. And also you should probably love yourself because if you did, you wouldn't like sea pineapples _._ " Nishinoya huffs, and his breath sends a warm shiver down Ennoshita's back. " _Sea_  pineapples," he says again, like he can't quite believe it. 

"It's an acquired taste," Ennoshita defends. "Maybe I should think about them the next time we Drift, see if you get it then."

"No way," Nishinoya says, aghast, "You can't do that to me, that's like,  _betrayal -_  " 

"That's life for you," Ennoshita says, because it is, but Nishinoya pulls back to study him, his mouth dropping its curve. Ennoshita blinks at him, feels Nishinoya's hands tighten in his shirt.

"Not for us, though," Nishinoya says, face serious. "You and me, we're not like that. We  _can't_  be like that."

Ennoshita considers this, tucks his arms around Nishinoya's waist without thinking much about it until Nishinoya makes a happy sort of noise and his eyes go soft at the edges. Nishinoya's seen everything, all the fear and all the ugly laid out  _bare,_ but he still looks at Ennoshita like he's  _worth_ it. Nishinoya trusts him, Nishinoya just - lets him in his head without ever thinking Ennoshita might take it all and leave.

"No," Ennoshita says, eventually: "We're not like that."

 

iv.

The alarm goes off at eleven p.m., blares through the Shatterdome and sends everyone running into emergency mode. It's an organized kind of panic, though; there's not a single person there who doesn't know exactly where they need to be. Ennoshita slips into LOCCENT, lets the flow of the crowd push him towards the front, where he slides in and fits himself in the space between Daichi and Nishinoya. 

"Category four, codename: Umibōzu," Suga says, turning away from displays and seismographs. "Eighteen miles off the coast. It's still underwater for now, but we'll have to move fast, before it gets too close to shore. Atlas One," he nods to Daichi and Kuroo, "prepare for deployment."  

"Volta, you're going in, too," Kiyoko says, and Ennoshita tenses up, stops breathing for a heartbeat. "For backup," she adds. "Hold the line."

He registers, vaguely, that everybody's staring at them, but he's not sure he can care much about that right now, so he ignores it and focuses on breathing normally. "Got it," he says, and Kiyoko's mouth stretches a little thinner.

"Suit up," Kiyoko tells him.

  

He's light headed and maybe a little dizzy and there are a hundred thousand reasons why he doesn't think he can do this, why he thinks he'll just let them down and  _lose._ The drive suit has never felt so heavy on his shoulders, it seems, and when the technicians lock the steel spine into the back, he kind of wishes it worked a little more as a metaphor. But there's no  _point_  in making excuses; not now, not ever.

"Hey," Suga says, touching his arm before they step into their Jaeger. "You're going to do fine." And then the hatch closes, slides shut, and the last sliver of Suga he can see is: his smile.

"Initiating neural handshake in ten," Volta Bravo tells them in a modulated voice. Ennoshita keeps his eyes open, counts down by twos.

At six, he takes a breath, at four, he thinks,  _well, this is it, isn't it?_  At two, he tells himself: he's not going to run away this time.

He shuts his eyes at zero.

 

v.  
 

"Atlas - Atlas, can you hear me?" Suga keeps his voice level over the comm.

"Yeah," Daichi says, steady as ever. "We're fine, just - it cut our power, we can't  _move -_  "

"Not the best thing to happen when you're fighting a Kaiju, but you know how these things are," Kuroo adds.

"You need to get out of there, are your escape pods still - "

"Jammed," Daichi says, and then he laughs, a dry kind of chuckle that comes out more like static. "We're stuck." 

The Drift starts humming low, anxiety and frustration gnawing at the connection from both ends, and Nishinoya's just about vibrating with impatience, Nishinoya wants to go in and  _help_  so Daichi and Kuroo won't have to die when they're right here, when they can fight -

Kiyoko cuts in. "Volta," she says: "Move in."

 

Right before they take their first step through the fray, it hits him: it never mattered whether he thought he was good enough or not. The only thing that matters right here and now is doing everything he can to stop that damn kaiju.

"Yeah," Nishinoya says, out loud, "Yeah, Chikara, you got it."

 

Umibōzu is -  _vague._  That's the only word Ennoshita can pull up when he looks at it; it's a hulking mass of black lethality, fading invisible in the night. He has to find it by the glow of its eyes and the luminous spray of its blood, splattered rough across its scaly skin. Atlas had torn open a latticework of gashes and wounds that stretch wide and glaring across its throat, cauterized and burnt dry. A little ways away, Atlas One itself sits stationary, waves lapping at its knees; a monolithic Thinker on a backdrop of stars and sea. It is perfectly still, as if Zeus had decided to sculpt a statue to hold up the sky instead.

The kaiju launches itself at them, the glint of its tail whipping through the air and back to slam them at the waist. The impact sends them skidding backwards in the ocean, pushing the water around them into small tsunamis that crash on their Jaeger like it's the side of a cliff, frothing white and foamy. They are half grace and half desperation when they dig their heels into metal and push back rock and debris and saltwater. Umibōzu's jaws stretch open (the inside of its mouth is strangely pretty; almost like a flower, Ennoshita thinks, in a moment of detached observation) and it lets out a scratchy shriek of a roar that sends shudders through their Conn-pod.

"The  _plasma cannon,_ " Nishinoya's shouting even as Ennoshita complies on reflex, brings his arms up to fire. There's a loud whirr as Volta powers up, but Umibōzu tears a path through the ocean and drowns out everything else with the sound of its gargantuan footfalls. Ennoshita starts to wonder: what if he'd been too slow to react, what if the Kaiju will get to them before they can get to it -

Umibōzu closes its claws around the Jaeger's left arm in a goddamn  _death grip_ , crushing the steel into a crumpled mess with a horrible grating crunch. The nerve paths in Ennoshita's drive suit short out with a crackle and send a flash of white-hot pain shooting from his shoulder down to his wrist.

"Left side's taken a hit," he grits out, not caring all that much if Kiyoko can hear him or not right now, this is  _not the time to be polite-_

And then Umibōzu digs deep gouges into Volta Bravo's armor, ripping off a chunk of metal plating with a strangled sort of hiss. It's pulling them down with its weight, forcing their Jaeger to bend at the knees and sink slow underwater. Umibōzu's trying to drown them, or at least submerge them enough so that they lose any advantage they had, but they're too close to shore and the water’s too shallow for anything but a power struggle. And all the while, the cannon keeps loading, the status bar a glowing white circle crawling to connect. Something in their Jaeger snaps with a screeching groan, and the Conn-pod starts flashing red and orange and  _critical,_  but -

The circle connects. 

"Point blank," Ennoshita observes to nobody in particular.

The first shot burns a sloppy hole in Umibōzu's chest. The second hits it under its jaw, tunnels a path of seared flesh halfway through its head, and Umibōzu rears back to topple. It does not go down with a crash or a dying scream; it goes down silent, head hanging down like it's praying. Volta's reeling from the recoil, staggering backwards, but Umibōzu is  _falling_ , in a long, vertical arc that's almost elegant. 

And it sinks shapeless in the ocean.

The next moments are a blur of Volta taking steps backwards until it keels over with a massive creak onto the shore. A full minute passes where the comm's just - silent, and they can't tell whether it's broken or worse and -

"No kaiju signal detected," Kiyoko says, the sound catching on torn wiring and flying sparks. Nishinoya breaks into a grin, disconnects them both from the Drift. They stumble out of the Conn-pod, tripping on shattered displays and bent metal, pressing their hands against the hatch to open it up. When they haul themselves up and out into the open air, they're checking for broken bones and injuries (Nishinoya's got cuts and bruises all over him and Ennoshita can't feel his left arm), but mostly they're  _relieved_ , gasping for breath and too tired to chant victory and they did it they did it they  _did it._

Their Jaeger has to be broken by now, all charcoal smoke and hissing sparks, spilling soot and scorched metal on the white beach they're standing on now. He thinks it's still beautiful, even half-destroyed like this; he thinks it's the prettiest wreck he's ever seen. Ennoshita glances at his hands, notices the sand speckled across his gloves like he'd dipped them in a bag of sugar.

He looks up again and - that's not quite right, is it? There is nothing in the sky, not even the smoke curling up from Volta, that's not -

His knees buckle, but he does not feel them hit the ground.

 

 

 

vi. 

There is a steady undercurrent of quiet whispers and rustling noises when Ennoshita wakes up. He doesn't open his eyes at first, just stays put and tries to reorient himself. He's lying down on - something soft, a bed; there's an intermittent beeping noise by his head and a warm weight pressed against his stomach, which is his cue to open his eyes and investigate. 

Nishinoya's sleeping in what looks to be the most uncomfortable position known to man; half-sitting in his chair, half sprawled over the edge of the bed. He's using Ennoshita as a pillow which is - well, he deserves that, probably. Ennoshita stifles a laugh at how much smaller Nishinoya looks like this, (his hair looks like he'd just taken a shower and skipped out on trying to style it) but the movement stirs Nishinoya out of his catnap. 

He opens his eyes, squints at the light, and then he shoots up, leaning towards Ennoshita's face. "Chikara!"

"Hello," Ennoshita starts, not entirely sure what to say. 

"You woke up, you've been sleeping for  _days,_ " Nishinoya says, voice rising on the  _days_ , and oh, that was definitely loud enough to draw attention. He thinks he can see Takeda behind the edge of a curtain and Tanaka's back through the slight gap in the door - they're in the medbay, he registers; the beeping and the bed and the curtains make sense, now. 

"Oh," Ennoshita remembers, glancing down at his arm. It’s all bandaged up. He moves it, experimentally, and it  _hurts,_  but he can feel it. 

There is a flurry of movement at the door, and then there are too many people bursting in, and the medbay goes from quiet to bustling in no time at all. Kinoshita and Narita make it in first, and then Suga and Daichi and Tanaka and just about everybody, it seems like. Like a welcome-back party, he thinks, right before they crowd around his bed.

(Ukai shoos them out after awhile, saying, "This is a  _medical bay_ , what the hell do you think you're doing?") 

 

"You didn’t have to make up for it, you know,” Nishinoya says, later, when it is quiet again.

Ennoshita blinks. “Maybe not,” he admits, feeling terribly, terribly silly all of a sudden.

“What do you mean, maybe?” Nishinoya huffs. "You know," he says, frank, honest, like he's always been (and maybe he'll always be this straightforward), "you're really stupid sometimes, Chikara."

Ennoshita flicks Nishinoya's forehead, smiles when Nishinoya wrinkles his nose at him. "I'm not sure I want to hear that from you."

“That’s  _rude_ ,” Nishinoya says, but he laughs anyway, rakes a hand through his hair to get it out of his face. Ennoshita finds himself reaching out to push his fingers through Nishinoya's hair, too, just to see if it's as soft as it looks (it is), without all the gel he usually puts in it. Nishinoya scrunches up his nose for a second before holding out his pinky. Ennoshita stares. "It's so you don't do that again," Nishinoya says, like it's a matter of fact. They both know what he means by ‘that’, and Ennoshita thinks he’d really rather not go through a repeat performance either. Nishinoya shrugs when Ennoshita raises his eyebrows. “Hey, it worked last time, right?”

"Yeah. Sorry about that," Ennoshita says, but he's reaching out to link their pinky fingers together, just like before.

Nishinoya shakes his head. "Nah," he says. He's said it too many times to count by now, but he says it like he'll remind him as many times as it takes. "You came back, so it's okay." 

"Yeah," Ennoshita says, marveling at how simple it had been, all along: "I came back."  

In the end, Ennoshita thinks; in the end, coming back feels a lot like coming home.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to sam, nina, femi, j, and rib for reading this like sixty million times over the past six weeks yall are memes but i love you a lot i think i could cry actually i'm tearing up i'm done praise the lord
> 
> title/first note from northern downpour by patd!
> 
> als o mother fuck i was tryna edit a thing and it ended up deleting half the goddamn fic RIP


End file.
